Old Tivos had to do an analog-to-digital conversion to store it on disk, so you could specify compression. Tivos now get a digital compressed mpeg2 stream (usually) and the only way to do what you suggest is to transcode to h.264 which takes a lot of horsepower to do without custom SOCs.

Old Tivos had to do an analog-to-digital conversion to store it on disk, so you could specify compression. Tivos now get a digital compressed mpeg2 stream (usually) and the only way to do what you suggest is to transcode to h.264 which takes a lot of horsepower to do without custom SOCs.

Actually, all but the Elite have an analog to digital converter.. You wouldn't really need to transcode it, *with slightly different hardware* you could essentially reroute the analog outputs back through the A/D converter.. That's what my XS32 does when you do rate-conversion dubbing (which is realtime of course).

No idea what the issue was but from what you said I wouldn't have expected it to be clipped since you have three tuners available for recording and only three shows to record. Personally I prefer not to miss any part of a show so I've always had clipping turned off.

TiVo is so dumb. It should be able to use the same tuner to record to two shows at once off the same channel for that one minute in the middle. I doubt it would be rocket science to do.

You're right, this is probably my #1 wish nowadays (since we now have a "ton" of tuners).. But IIRC, NOT all other DVRs do this either. Some do, but some don't.

Heck, at least when it *first* came out (I do not know if this has been fixed), Primetime Anytime on DISH did *not* properly save off 'padding'. (Recording all of primetime, then even "manually" saving off shows with padding on each end pretty much solves the tuner dilemma.)

You're right, this is probably my #1 wish nowadays (since we now have a "ton" of tuners).. But IIRC, NOT all other DVRs do this either. Some do, but some don't.

Heck, at least when it *first* came out (I do not know if this has been fixed), Primetime Anytime on DISH did *not* properly save off 'padding'. (Recording all of primetime, then even "manually" saving off shows with padding on each end pretty much solves the tuner dilemma.)

So basically, Tivo's not worse than most of them.

Agreed. It just seems that TiVo should be ahead of the pack and held to a higher standard since they are selling a premium, "aftermarket" product that's not just another crappy MSO box.

DISH's Hopper is a neat device, but it's basically a 2-tuner box, as PTAT uses one, so you're left with 2 tuners for everything else, I'd much rather have TiVo's 4 tuners.